The Hilltop Review Volume 7 Issue 2 Spring Article 17 April 2015 From “Black is Beautiful” to “Gay Power”: Cultural Frames in the Gay Liberation Movement Eric Denby Western Michigan University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/hilltopreview Part of the Cultural History Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Denby, Eric (2015) "From “Black is Beautiful” to “Gay Power”: Cultural Frames in the Gay Liberation Movement," The Hilltop Review: Vol. 7 : Iss. 2 , Article 17. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/hilltopreview/vol7/iss2/17 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate College at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Hilltop Review by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact wmu- [email protected]. 132 From “Black is Beautiful” to “Gay Power”: Cultural Frames in the Gay Liberation Movement Runner-Up, 2014 Graduate Humanities Conference By Eric Denby Department of History [email protected] The 1960s and 1970s were a decade of turbulence, militancy, and unrest in America. The post-World War II boom in consumerism and consumption made way for a new post- materialist societal ethos, one that looked past the American dream of home ownership and material wealth. Many citizens were now concerned with social and economic equality, justice for all people of the world, and a restructuring of the capitalist system itself. According to Max Elbaum, the traditional narrative of the 1960s begins with an “idealistic, impassioned” youth working on voter registration and civil rights and ends with “days of rage as the sixties movement, frustrated by the Vietnam War, became irrational and self- destructive.”i What started out as middle-class students organizing in the South for civil rights slowly transformed into “the emergence of the New Left, the antiwar movement, women’s liberation, and identity based politics.”ii The New Left protest groups of this decade are important to gay radicalism because they created the foundational strategies for future gay activism.iii Although Homophile organizations existed in the 1940s and 1950s, gay radicalism did not fully blossom until the language, style, and strategies of the New Left emerged during the decade of discontent, chiefly embodied by the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Black Panther Party.iv In Maurice Issserman and Michael Kazin’s view, “the New Left was a profoundly American movement, inspired by the civil rights movement, and fashioning its early political beliefs from a combination of American radical traditions.”v Originally, the New Left focused on social justice issues – poverty, race, equality – through conscience raising events. Eventually, as the Vietnam War escalated, and the stark realities of American imperialism became more apparent, many adopted a militant approach.vi The scholarly literature of gay history explains that gay liberation and gay rights groups have borrowed and adopted the various frames and strategies of previous protest movements. This paper seeks to understand the direct connections between homophile and gay liberation groups and previous social movements in the United States using cultural framing theory. To accomplish this, I explore two of the more powerful and resonant frames: the “Gay is Good” and “Gay Power” frames, both of which were adopted from the American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power respectively. This paper is not meant to imply a unidirectional relationship; I simply focus on two of the many frames employed by gay liberation and gay rights groups. Gay radicalism may easily be placed within the larger New Left struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. Following the turbulent Stonewall Riots of 1969, a new form of activism emerged – gay liberation.vii Many of the narratives regarding gay liberation mark Stonewall as the beginning of the movement, both in scholarly literature and public memory. Popular myth places those riots as the origin of the gay liberation movement. To some, Stonewall began all gay activism. David Carter writes, “it is also commonly asserted that the riot…marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.”viii Simon Hall concurs, offering Stonewall as the “year zero” of “public consciousness and historical memory.”ix As John D’Emilio and numerous others have shown, Stonewall was not the ground zero of activism.x Meaghan Nappo explains that Stonewall simply possesses a large mnemonic capacity that allows for a unified “beginning” in the collective memory of many individuals, both within and outside of The Hilltop Review, Spring 2015 Eric Denby 133 the gay community.xi Others have asserted the myth of Stonewall was a conscious effort on the part of gay liberation activists, to provide a simple breaking point between the assimilationists and single issue focus of 1950s homophile groups and the new liberation strategies of the Gay Liberation Front after Stonewall.xii While this origin story is contested in the literature, Stonewall did have a direct impact; a few days after the riot, the Gay Liberation Front of New York (GLF/NY) was formed.xiii The GLF/NY quickly adopted “the rhetoric of political manifestos” from the numerous “self- identified minority group activist organizations.”xiv Within a year, gay liberation organizations sprouted in many American cities, including Philadelphia, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Detroit.xv The Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was a new type of organization within the larger gay community. Co-opting the language of other liberation groups, the GLF began to distribute information and hold meetings. Flyers read, “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are. We’re going to make a place for ourselves and the revolutionary movements. We challenge the myths that are screwing up society.”xvi Another flyer asked homosexuals to join the organization “to examine how we are oppressed and how we oppress ourselves and to fight for gay control of gay businesses,” reminiscent of the Black Panther’s call of self-sufficiency.xvii The general ethos of gay groups changed from the assimilation strategies of homophile groups to the liberationist tactics of the 1960s.xviii In fact, Marxism was prevalent in many of these groups, and the pre-Stonewall “homophile goal of tolerance for homosexuals” was inadequate; “sexual freedom required structural change, not just changes in laws.”xix In an effort to resolve the dilemma of resource mobilization and political process theory that does not account for cultural elements and ideas, David Snow and others have written extensively on the framing processes of social movement groups and actors.xx In fact, according to Doug McAdam et al., it was the importance of culture elements that differentiated new social movements from the old.xxi For this essay, I borrow Mayer Zald’s traditional definition of culture as “the shared beliefs and understanding, mediated by and constituted by symbols and language, of a group or society.”xxii Likewise, frames are the “specific metaphors, symbolic representations, and cognitive cues used to render or cast behavior and events.”xxiii From “Black is Beautiful” to “Gay is Good” The genesis of “Gay is Good” as a slogan and a cultural frame is easy to determine. As stated earlier, many gay organizations groups adopted tactics, rhetoric, and strategies from previous social protest movements. The most common example is the Civil Rights movement, which framed their grievances in relation to civil liberties and equality for all. “Gay is Good” is directly adopted from the “black is beautiful” movement of the 1960s.xxiv In an effort to combat the racial stereotypes of ugly physical features, various black rights groups sought to recuperate the “maligned, defiled, [and] destroyed black body” of the past.xxv Franklin Kameny was the primary figure of the “Gay is Good” frame. A co-founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, Kameny became increasingly vocal of his displeasure with the homophile movement’s assimilationist tendencies. Speaking at a convention of the Mattachine Society of N.Y. in 1964, Kameny asserted his beliefs against “the homophile obsession with discovering the cause of homosexuality and the organization’s deferment to the psychology establishment’s labeling of homosexuality as a mental sickness.”xxvi He introduced the idea of homosexuality as not an illness, but a “characteristic marking a particular group of people.”xxvii According to Stephen M. Engel, Kameny used the cultural frame of the civil rights movement, contending that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) did not worry about which gene caused black skin; they were only interested in securing fairness and The Hilltop Review, Spring 2015 134 From “Black is Beautiful” to “Gay Power” equality.xxviii This is a prime example of frame alignment – the act of interpreting a group’s cause or goals with already created and culturally understood concepts.xxix As much of the literature attests, this civil rights frame is one of the more widely used in American protest movements.xxx The following year, as head of the newly formed Washington, DC, chapter of Mattachine, Kameny reemphasized this point. Speaking at the 1965 Eastern Region Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) he stated that “homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with, and not different in kind from, heterosexuality.”xxxi Just as the Black Power movement combated racial stereotypes, Kameny was beginning to create the foundation of “Gay is Good” as a new way to view one’s own homosexuality and, in turn, influence a greater societal acceptance. The formal acceptance of the slogan was approved in 1968 at the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, which adopted “Gay is Good” in its official platform.